AI and the Increased Workload Effect

Lately it seems like everyone is buzzing about AI and what the prospect holds for our lives and livelihoods. Change is imminent. It’s hard to deny this fact, but the question everyone wants to know is, “Will it be for the better?” Since our work at Deducers focus on production, what Rebecca and I have been pondering is, “What will AI mean for the creative industry generally and producers more specifically?” 

I can’t tell you the answer to these questions definitively. Only time will tell. I worry about the deep fakes like many people do, and I recognize that AI might end careers for some hard working and deserving folks. I wish that our society had the resources and the willingness to help everyone adapt to the changing landscape. I also recognize the power AI has to help us with a variety of tasks from the mundane and the menial, to the deeply challenging. Here, what I want to discuss is something else that I’ve noticed and that I think we’re all likely to face with the changing technological landscape—I’ll call it the increased workload effect. 

Just the other evening my husband and I were watching a documentary on technology that changed the world. Chew on this for a moment—email was once touted as a means to making people’s workload more manageable. It was supposed to make things easier; it was thought to ensure us all a better work-life balance. In many ways it has. We can send communications at the click of a button and keep them stored in a virtual space so paper isn’t overflowing the office. I frankly cannot imagine life without email, nor would I desire to revert back to the days when paper trails were the standard way to go. Even so, fast forward to 2024 and we know that email hasn’t really done anything positive for the work-life balance. If anything, people complain that instant access makes them tethered to work, even during their time off.  Indeed, the email inbox of today can be a very daunting  place. Not only are there potentially hundreds of messages that come through each day that you need to read, but there are many more that you need to set and monitor filters for so that you don't get bogged down even more by an unearthly amount of unnecessary crap. Multiply that times several email accounts, which if you’re like me you most certainly have, and you can quickly glean that email has not decreased but vastly increased the amount of actual work you’re required to do. 

Let’s take another example. For the bulk of my professional life I’ve worked in academia, and I often reflect on what it must have been like for scholars of the past to conduct research and publish their work. Gone are the days where you physically lumbar to the library, load your backpack with books and take them home to write an article. Now, everything is at the touch of your fingertips. This is great! You can do research from your home or from inside the office, and so much knowledge and experience is more accessible to all who want to access it. On the flip side, it also means that you have much more to sift through and read, synthesize, analyze and eventually reference, in painstaking detail, should you need to produce something of high quality, like an academic publication or even a college level lesson. Importantly, you have to weed out the solid works from the sea of mostly subpar material. New technologies have made information so much more accessible, and with this, academic standards have gone up. 

Now that chat GPT and other generative AI are available, the curve has gone even higher. Instant summaries of material are within reach. This is phenomenal. Well, sort of. If you use it, and if you have hopes of verifying that the content it spits out is accurate, you’d better have read the cannon. In my experience, it currently does well with some things and very poorly with quite a few others. It is not yet trustworthy, but even once it becomes super reliable, unless you’ve become a scholar already, you won’t be able to judge the difference. There is no replacement for learning here, just the need to learn more and conquer yet another technology.

Now let’s talk about the creative industry. What does AI mean for creatives? My guess is that it will be seriously helpful for certain things. Perhaps it will help creatives get out of a funk, just like it can help writers get out of writer’s block. Perhaps it can help get a leg up on some spot that a  studio is creating for a client. Just imagine how cool it would be if you could lasso an image and with a short description have it beautifully rotoscope an image or series of them. Not only that but imagine the image is something like Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia—a lion full of fur! Then again, perhaps it will increase the amount of work creatives have to do. In fact, I suspect that it will. I suspect the bar for the amount of creative work required has increased and will continue to rise as AI gets better. If AI can take over certain aspects of the creative process, then that means more room for human beings to do other creative tasks. If AI can create artistic references, will clients want more variations? If AI can produce a spot, will clients expect more and better adaptations and tweaks? 

Look, I’m not a creative, nor am I a soothsayer, but I doubt using AI to create or modify content in just the way you or your client wants it to look is something that will ever be done at the snap of a finger, unless you get really lucky. People always want more. Psychologists know that our minds are associative; one thought prompts another. Just like when I say taco, you might think salsa. An AI design or even a spot might be the baseline, but I suspect that will give rise to more ideas and demands. As of now, designing prompts is currently an art in itself. Modifying creative products most certainly requires finesse and a human touch. I suspect that as AI gets better, clients' demands for finessing work, adapting pieces, and producing more content, in general, will increase the better that AI gets. Creatives of all levels will have to become highly adept at knowing why to do certain things to get a desired result, in addition to knowing how to do them. While certain aspects of the current creative process might become null, the overall workload needed to meet clients’ creative demands might well increase as AI gets better. 

What does this mean for producers and small studio owners (who often take on the role of a producer)? Most certainly, they will need to adapt and to use this new technology. Here I think that AI will come to the rescue for a variety of tasks many of us wish we could take off our plates. For example, think about note taking for a moment. AI transcriptions and summaries are already popular, useful tools that can help producers with quick and accurate references from team meetings and client conversations. Certain automations can make life easier, including automating information from conversations to task lists. Even so, it’s hard to imagine how AI will be useful for many aspects of relationship management. People have different personalities, on different days of the week, depending on things like whether they got a good night’s sleep, had a fight with a significant other, or are bogged down by external factors unknown to the AI. Many tasks producers perform most certainly need a human touch. In fact, I imagine that their soft-skills will be their greatest assets in guarding projects and guiding clients through all the quagmires of the new creative process. 

Importantly, I suspect that producers and studio owners will be most impacted by the increased workload effect. Just like creatives, the bar has been raised and will continue to rise as AI gets better. As quality AI becomes more accessible, the task load studios are expected to take on is likely to go up. Demands for more ideas, versions, variations, and modifications, means more work to manage, more clients and teams to manage, and potentially multiple processes for producers and small studio owners to know, own and navigate—that is, more notes, more feedback, and more tasks. It also means more oversight of these notes, feedback and tasks, in addition to more dancing around personal reactions to them. Potentially, it means more conversations with clients about overages and with teams about expectations and responsibilities. More than ever, there is likely to be an elevated need for great producers to manage it all. Until studios can afford a virtual data assistant to manage all projects, human beings will be doing these tasks, and let’s be real, who would want a robot to head up client relationships anyway?! People like to communicate with other people! Even if you enjoy having silly conversations with Alexa, relationships exist between living and breathing things. They exist because of our emotional intelligence, not because of our analytical, data crunching abilities. 

So, will AI be for the better? Right now I think there will be some bitter and some sweet. Like the rest of the world, I am keeping a careful eye on the former while rooting for the latter. I think certain kinds of work will be diminished or eliminated and other kinds will become all the more in demand. Overall, I think there is a good chance that there will be an increased workload for everyone in the creative industry, and while that might seem daunting, I will end on an optimistic note. If we can join forces with one another to help each other learn how to make the technology work for us rather than against us, we might just have a shot at producing a better work and work-life future for us all.